Thermopylae to Salamis
"Evidently Herodotus comes into and goes out of fashion on a regular basis..."
Here is a virtual reprint of Skiing Uphill from 2005, talking about the final end of the second Persian Invasion. The movie "300" is making waves these days, and I've referred to it* in this blog before, but I thought you might like to know how the invasion finally ended. The Spartans held off the Persians long enough for the Greek city-states to integrate their militias. The defeat at the Battle of Platea effectively ended the "Asian" land threat to the West until Constantinople fell on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, and finally stopped the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna on September 11 and September 12, 1683.[* The invasion, not the movie, although I have referred to a referral to the movie. See "They Get Their Own Facts" from last week.]
Ten years before, the combined Greek forces had met the Persians on the Plains of Marathon and defeated them, as Xerxes' father, Darius was forced to retreat in humiliation (490 BC). Xerxes second invasion was as much a matter of Persian pride as anything else. His order that the Hellespont be whipped after a storm wiped out the Persian pontoon bridge is an ancient Western cliche of hubris.
One member of the famed Athenian "barefoot" battalion was later found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens and was executed by lethal libation, as chronicled by a youngster named Plato in the Phaedo. This time (481 BC), the Greek navies had to deal with the Persian invasion fleet, probably the largest armada ever gathered up to that time.
This is the denouement, even though it was before the 300 Spartans fell at Thermopylae. And how the Athenians faced THEIR "terror." (As in "war on" etc.) The governorship which is referred to is that of the state of Oregon.
-- HW
Sunday, July 10, 2005
THE LESSONS OF SALAMIS or, LAND OF THE FRAIDY CATS?
Friday, we started talking on the radio about the "War on Terror" (or, as Bush enunciates it, the "War on Terra" -- which is more to the point). And while there was not enough time to go into it, we did get to the matter that the war only "succeeded" by keeping us terrified -- on both the "good" side and on the "bad" side.
Now, I'm going to go a bit afield, but I assure you that this will make sense by the end.
After receiving my THIRD review copy of Barry Strauss' history, "THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS, The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece -- And Western Civilization," I kind of figured I'd better read it quick, before my house fills with review copies and I have to start a small distributorship just to get rid of the excess. Not being so commercially inclined, I read it.
It is a 'good' book, although not one that I'd recommend unreservedly. The story is an important one, and if you don't know it, you should, for our entire tradition of Western Liberal Democracy faced then its darkest hour.
Strauss is an engaging writer, and there are passages in it that burn with lambent fire. But it is a decidedly flawed narrative, and you need to have a few filters set before you start to read it. Still, it IS worth reading, and far more worth your time than that abomination "TROY" that's playing on the premium cable channels this month.
Now, here's the bad news:
Strauss' use of pseudo-novelistic effects is particularly grating: the pretended knowledge of what is in a "character's" mind; the "set the scene" descriptions, and the rest of the phony dramatic clutter that poisons so much of modern historical writing all are flaws that cannot be ignored. There is also a tendency to gush about how wonderful some point is, or how awful some other thing is.
And some of this is, perhaps, necessary. To write a book about one battle, some padding may be required, and I think there is a good deal of padding in the book. I tend to agree on Strauss' enthusiasms, but I don't believe them to be history: the past is what it was, not what it is today.
Strauss' tokenism regarding Queen Artemisia, endlessly praising her because she's a woman, and how he needs to bring things into "modern" context is particularly galling, and gives a clue that too much ideological bias has rose-colored his glasses to take him as entirely authoritative -- most especially since, by the end, Artemisia emerges as one of the most vicious and unscrupulous villainesses since Snow White's evil stepmother. History has been warped to contemporary ideological needs, a sure tipoff that things may not be entirely "fair and balanced."
Naturally, this bit player is prominent on the back cover blurb, and in the Press Release, evidently so that the "women's market" will buy the book. Suffice it to say that Artemisia could have been left out of the story entirely without fundamentally affecting our understanding of the Battle of Salamis -- a sure tipoff that demographics have triumphed over scholarship. How sad.
And there is the inevitable internal debating that is less an illumination than an annoyance. For instance, at one point, he engages in a long, pointless blither as to whether the Greeks had a navy of 378 ships, 368 ships or 400 ships. Several pages later, he notes that the Persian fleet had "well over 100,000 men," which begs the question, who CARES exactly how many ships the Greeks had? The difference between a high of 400 and a low of 368 seems so inconsequential as to be meaningless. Quick! Imagine 400 ships. Now, imagine the same scene with only 368 ships.
I do not know if it is Postmodernism or Television that has turned our scholars into nitwits, but the fact that clear thinking has all but vanished from our land is self-evident. That no editor said "This is pointless" and blue-penciled the offending passage (and others) is a testament to the loss of professionalism in publishing that has attended my entire writing career. Such a passage would never have "made the cut" before 1970, say.
Finally, he relies very heavily on Herodotus (the 'father' of History) which is fine, except that he's constantly defending Herodotus as a good historian against a sea of detractors in some debate to which we are not privy. Evidently Herodotus comes into and goes out of fashion on a regular basis. Plutarch and the playwright Aeschylus are cited, abetted by various contemporary and archaeological sources, but, fundamentally, it's Herodotus. (There is a long acknowedgement of all the books ABOUT Herodotus that the author has read).
At least, Aeschylus actually fought at the battle, as a 45-year-old soldier, manning the shore to assist Greek survivors and spear Persians swimming away from wrecks. (A decade before, he fought at the Battle of Marathon, as well). But Strauss is not keen on Aeschylus.
All right: now that I've finished snarking, let's look at the story, which is one of our most important NON-mythological inheritances from Greece, and which is eerily contemporary, as history repeats itself over and over again. (Strauss would undoubtedly disagree with the hoary wisdom of the old cliche, but history DOES repeat itself with frightening regularity).
The "Terror" in this case was Persia. After Darius had invaded Greece a decade before, only to be turned back at the Battle of Marathon (whose distance from Athens still forms the distance of our modern-day Marathons), Darius' son, Xerxes returned to Greece with the largest and most ethnically diverse army seen in the world to that time, to avenge his father, and finish the job.
Avenge his father. Finish the job. Sound familiar?
The famously bickering Greeks manage to form a small impossibly-rare coalition, Athens and Sparta standing side by side with a handful of other city-states, but the majority of the Greeks fought for the Persians. Only twenty-two Greek states were represented on the "Greek" side at Salamis.
"All told, there were fifteen hundred Greek city-states. Yet only a relative handful -- only thirty-one city-states -- joined the coalition against Persia. In fact, more Greek city-states fought on the other side. Persia was too strong and loyalty to the idea of Greece too weak to make the Hellenic League any more powerful. Athens, Sparta, and the few other city-states that stood up to Persia spoke harshly of Greek traitors, but most Greeks would have shrugged their shoulders at the charge." [p. 16-17]
And so, the few legendary Greeks began the defense of their homeland that would stop the Persian advance once and for all, and lead to the "Golden Age" of Greek Civilization and democracy that still influences our Western systems of government to this day.
We are astonished at the sheer brass of these few, proud freemen standing against the largest empire that the world had yet seen, refusing to capitulate to the easy path of a light Persian rule and tribute, but, instead, staking their lives, families and cities on being able to defeat the technologically superior, vastly more numerous and immeasurably more battle-tested Persian coalition, with troops from as far away as Afghanistan, Africa and Egypt.
The Greeks surprised the Persians at Artemesium, their 271 warships charging a Persian fleet of 700 (with another 200 coming up from the south) and inflicting severe losses on the Persians. The Persians started with about 1400 triremes -- triple-tiers of oars on very fast, but very narrow and not very seaworthy warships. By the time they got to Salamis, after Greek attacks and devastating storm losses, the Persian fleet numbered around 650 triremes.
The hero of the piece is Themistocles, the Athenian politician/warrior. And the story really is about a man who has to trick his political opponents, his city, his fellow city-states, and, finally, the Persians, to win the battle.
The reader is reminded that it is a sad truth of democracies that one must often battle as obstinately with one's own "troops" as with the enemy.
Opposed at virtually every turn by bickering politicians, citizens, admirals and other Greeks, Themistocles somehow managed to bring about the battle of Salamis at the time and place of his choosing, his last trick having pushed half the Persian fleet into the narrow strait where their lighter, more maneuverable triremes fought at a disadvantage, where the heavier Athenian and Greek triremes held an advantage of a battle of ships ramming ships.
The various coalitions were subject to treachery, and changing sides at the drop of a hat, and the Persians had been highly successful at bribing Greeks to switch sides at crucial moments. Themistocles played on this, too, brilliantly.
"The key to misinformation is telling people what they want to hear. [Themistocles' slave] Sincinnus did precisely this. Sincinnus did not tell the Persians to fight a naval battle at Salamis. He did not need to ... [he] did nothing more than to precipitate the timing." [p. 116]
And we note the manner in which Ahmed Chalabi was able to convince the Bushies to invade Iraq, by telling them that the Iraqis would welcome them, famously, "with flowers." This little trick of misinformation works quite well in the present-day, as well.
But the finest hour of the war, and the real crux of what I'm getting at is the decision that the city of Athens took, and when they carried it out, after learning that the Spartans under King Leonidas had died to the last man at Thermopylae delaying the Persian army.
I want you to read this, but I want you to think about the United States of America under "attack" and our response to that attack: fear, panic and terror. The Direktor of Fatherland Sekurity, after last week's London attack, told us that it was a "Terror Alert," or, literally, that we should be terrified to an Orange extent were we on a bus or train, but only terrified Yellow otherwise.
And it continues:
The largest army in the history of the world was now bearing down on Athens, unchecked and unstoppable on a cleared road, to execute the stated purpose of Xerxes to punish Athens, and they would most likely slaughter any Athenian found in the environs, or, at best, send them in chains to the slave-markets of the Middle East to be sold.
Were the Athenians terrified Yellow?
Listen:
The Athenians voted to evacuate the entire city-state (about 150,000, says Strauss).
The Athenians were anything BUT terrorized.
Contrast this with our democracy and its response to terror. Did the Athenians panic? Did the Athenians give in to their very real and debilitating fears? And, more importantly, do we have the courage of the Athenians? Are we willing to all man the watchtowers?
Therein hangs our tale.
Oh, and Artemisia? She escaped being rammed at the battle of Salamis by treacherously turning her ship and sinking the Persian ship next to her, thus convincing the Greek commander bearing down on her that she had switched sides. None of the unfortunate ship's crew survived (perhaps due to the archers on board the Queen's trireme), and in the fog of war -- and the "spin" of Artemisia's circle -- Xerxes was convinced that she had fought gallantly in the disaster that Salamis was for the Persian navy. She gained greater favor in the Persian empire. The Persian admiral, by contrast, was given a spindle and distaff. "In Greece, it was a symbol of womanhood. So to give a distaff to a naval commander was surely an insult." [p. 215]
Artemisia was given the prize for bravery in battle. "The story is told that Artemisia received a full suit of Greek armor as a sign of her achievement." [ibid.]
Not exactly what one would call a feminist role model.
Unless, of course, one is running for governor.
Courage.
No. Seriously: Courage.
Friday, we started talking on the radio about the "War on Terror" (or, as Bush enunciates it, the "War on Terra" -- which is more to the point). And while there was not enough time to go into it, we did get to the matter that the war only "succeeded" by keeping us terrified -- on both the "good" side and on the "bad" side.
Now, I'm going to go a bit afield, but I assure you that this will make sense by the end.
After receiving my THIRD review copy of Barry Strauss' history, "THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS, The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece -- And Western Civilization," I kind of figured I'd better read it quick, before my house fills with review copies and I have to start a small distributorship just to get rid of the excess. Not being so commercially inclined, I read it.
It is a 'good' book, although not one that I'd recommend unreservedly. The story is an important one, and if you don't know it, you should, for our entire tradition of Western Liberal Democracy faced then its darkest hour.
Strauss is an engaging writer, and there are passages in it that burn with lambent fire. But it is a decidedly flawed narrative, and you need to have a few filters set before you start to read it. Still, it IS worth reading, and far more worth your time than that abomination "TROY" that's playing on the premium cable channels this month.
Now, here's the bad news:
Strauss' use of pseudo-novelistic effects is particularly grating: the pretended knowledge of what is in a "character's" mind; the "set the scene" descriptions, and the rest of the phony dramatic clutter that poisons so much of modern historical writing all are flaws that cannot be ignored. There is also a tendency to gush about how wonderful some point is, or how awful some other thing is.
And some of this is, perhaps, necessary. To write a book about one battle, some padding may be required, and I think there is a good deal of padding in the book. I tend to agree on Strauss' enthusiasms, but I don't believe them to be history: the past is what it was, not what it is today.
Strauss' tokenism regarding Queen Artemisia, endlessly praising her because she's a woman, and how he needs to bring things into "modern" context is particularly galling, and gives a clue that too much ideological bias has rose-colored his glasses to take him as entirely authoritative -- most especially since, by the end, Artemisia emerges as one of the most vicious and unscrupulous villainesses since Snow White's evil stepmother. History has been warped to contemporary ideological needs, a sure tipoff that things may not be entirely "fair and balanced."
Naturally, this bit player is prominent on the back cover blurb, and in the Press Release, evidently so that the "women's market" will buy the book. Suffice it to say that Artemisia could have been left out of the story entirely without fundamentally affecting our understanding of the Battle of Salamis -- a sure tipoff that demographics have triumphed over scholarship. How sad.
And there is the inevitable internal debating that is less an illumination than an annoyance. For instance, at one point, he engages in a long, pointless blither as to whether the Greeks had a navy of 378 ships, 368 ships or 400 ships. Several pages later, he notes that the Persian fleet had "well over 100,000 men," which begs the question, who CARES exactly how many ships the Greeks had? The difference between a high of 400 and a low of 368 seems so inconsequential as to be meaningless. Quick! Imagine 400 ships. Now, imagine the same scene with only 368 ships.
I do not know if it is Postmodernism or Television that has turned our scholars into nitwits, but the fact that clear thinking has all but vanished from our land is self-evident. That no editor said "This is pointless" and blue-penciled the offending passage (and others) is a testament to the loss of professionalism in publishing that has attended my entire writing career. Such a passage would never have "made the cut" before 1970, say.
Finally, he relies very heavily on Herodotus (the 'father' of History) which is fine, except that he's constantly defending Herodotus as a good historian against a sea of detractors in some debate to which we are not privy. Evidently Herodotus comes into and goes out of fashion on a regular basis. Plutarch and the playwright Aeschylus are cited, abetted by various contemporary and archaeological sources, but, fundamentally, it's Herodotus. (There is a long acknowedgement of all the books ABOUT Herodotus that the author has read).
At least, Aeschylus actually fought at the battle, as a 45-year-old soldier, manning the shore to assist Greek survivors and spear Persians swimming away from wrecks. (A decade before, he fought at the Battle of Marathon, as well). But Strauss is not keen on Aeschylus.
All right: now that I've finished snarking, let's look at the story, which is one of our most important NON-mythological inheritances from Greece, and which is eerily contemporary, as history repeats itself over and over again. (Strauss would undoubtedly disagree with the hoary wisdom of the old cliche, but history DOES repeat itself with frightening regularity).
The "Terror" in this case was Persia. After Darius had invaded Greece a decade before, only to be turned back at the Battle of Marathon (whose distance from Athens still forms the distance of our modern-day Marathons), Darius' son, Xerxes returned to Greece with the largest and most ethnically diverse army seen in the world to that time, to avenge his father, and finish the job.
Avenge his father. Finish the job. Sound familiar?
The famously bickering Greeks manage to form a small impossibly-rare coalition, Athens and Sparta standing side by side with a handful of other city-states, but the majority of the Greeks fought for the Persians. Only twenty-two Greek states were represented on the "Greek" side at Salamis.
"All told, there were fifteen hundred Greek city-states. Yet only a relative handful -- only thirty-one city-states -- joined the coalition against Persia. In fact, more Greek city-states fought on the other side. Persia was too strong and loyalty to the idea of Greece too weak to make the Hellenic League any more powerful. Athens, Sparta, and the few other city-states that stood up to Persia spoke harshly of Greek traitors, but most Greeks would have shrugged their shoulders at the charge." [p. 16-17]
And so, the few legendary Greeks began the defense of their homeland that would stop the Persian advance once and for all, and lead to the "Golden Age" of Greek Civilization and democracy that still influences our Western systems of government to this day.
We are astonished at the sheer brass of these few, proud freemen standing against the largest empire that the world had yet seen, refusing to capitulate to the easy path of a light Persian rule and tribute, but, instead, staking their lives, families and cities on being able to defeat the technologically superior, vastly more numerous and immeasurably more battle-tested Persian coalition, with troops from as far away as Afghanistan, Africa and Egypt.
The Greeks surprised the Persians at Artemesium, their 271 warships charging a Persian fleet of 700 (with another 200 coming up from the south) and inflicting severe losses on the Persians. The Persians started with about 1400 triremes -- triple-tiers of oars on very fast, but very narrow and not very seaworthy warships. By the time they got to Salamis, after Greek attacks and devastating storm losses, the Persian fleet numbered around 650 triremes.
The hero of the piece is Themistocles, the Athenian politician/warrior. And the story really is about a man who has to trick his political opponents, his city, his fellow city-states, and, finally, the Persians, to win the battle.
The reader is reminded that it is a sad truth of democracies that one must often battle as obstinately with one's own "troops" as with the enemy.
Opposed at virtually every turn by bickering politicians, citizens, admirals and other Greeks, Themistocles somehow managed to bring about the battle of Salamis at the time and place of his choosing, his last trick having pushed half the Persian fleet into the narrow strait where their lighter, more maneuverable triremes fought at a disadvantage, where the heavier Athenian and Greek triremes held an advantage of a battle of ships ramming ships.
The various coalitions were subject to treachery, and changing sides at the drop of a hat, and the Persians had been highly successful at bribing Greeks to switch sides at crucial moments. Themistocles played on this, too, brilliantly.
"The key to misinformation is telling people what they want to hear. [Themistocles' slave] Sincinnus did precisely this. Sincinnus did not tell the Persians to fight a naval battle at Salamis. He did not need to ... [he] did nothing more than to precipitate the timing." [p. 116]
And we note the manner in which Ahmed Chalabi was able to convince the Bushies to invade Iraq, by telling them that the Iraqis would welcome them, famously, "with flowers." This little trick of misinformation works quite well in the present-day, as well.
But the finest hour of the war, and the real crux of what I'm getting at is the decision that the city of Athens took, and when they carried it out, after learning that the Spartans under King Leonidas had died to the last man at Thermopylae delaying the Persian army.
I want you to read this, but I want you to think about the United States of America under "attack" and our response to that attack: fear, panic and terror. The Direktor of Fatherland Sekurity, after last week's London attack, told us that it was a "Terror Alert," or, literally, that we should be terrified to an Orange extent were we on a bus or train, but only terrified Yellow otherwise.
And it continues:
Homeland Chief: 'No Perfect Security'or, just from Googling today's news:
Washington Post - July 10
WASHINGTON -- People taking mass transit face a risk of attacks like the explosions in London last week even though train and bus security has improved in recent years, top homeland security officials said Sunday.
The ObserverCompare this with the "terror alert" the Athenians faced in 480 B.C. (Straub doesn't use the current PC term B.C.E. or, "Before Current Era" I note.):
'Real threat' forces evacuation
CNN International - 5 hours ago
Cars pass a motorway warning sign near Birmingham after thousands were evacuated from the city center. LONDON, England (CNN) -- Evacuation orders for the entertainment district of Britain's second-largest ...
20,000 evacuated in Birmingham terror alert - China Daily
Officials defend Birmingham evacuation - Financial Times
The largest army in the history of the world was now bearing down on Athens, unchecked and unstoppable on a cleared road, to execute the stated purpose of Xerxes to punish Athens, and they would most likely slaughter any Athenian found in the environs, or, at best, send them in chains to the slave-markets of the Middle East to be sold.
Were the Athenians terrified Yellow?
Listen:
The Athenians voted to evacuate the entire city-state (about 150,000, says Strauss).
"Nothing so became the land of the Athenians as the manner of their leaving it. In light of the common criticism of democracy as soft and submissive, it is worth appraising the price that democratic Athens was willing to pay for freedom. The Athenian assembly voted not only to send its young men out to battle but to uproot its elderly, its women, and its children ... Later generations would revere the decision for exile and inscribe and reinscribe it in stone. They celebrated its daring, and they were right. While most Greeks surrendered, while their Peloponnesian allies tried to abandon them, the Athenians thought it a high honor to resist Persia. Rather than flee Greece, says Herodotus, "they stayed behind and waited courageously for the enemy to invade their land." The day they passed a motion to evacuate Athens, the Athenians decided that not only their soldiers and rowers stood on the watchtowers of history, they all did." [p. 65]And, with few exceptions, they all did.
The Athenians were anything BUT terrorized.
Contrast this with our democracy and its response to terror. Did the Athenians panic? Did the Athenians give in to their very real and debilitating fears? And, more importantly, do we have the courage of the Athenians? Are we willing to all man the watchtowers?
Therein hangs our tale.
Oh, and Artemisia? She escaped being rammed at the battle of Salamis by treacherously turning her ship and sinking the Persian ship next to her, thus convincing the Greek commander bearing down on her that she had switched sides. None of the unfortunate ship's crew survived (perhaps due to the archers on board the Queen's trireme), and in the fog of war -- and the "spin" of Artemisia's circle -- Xerxes was convinced that she had fought gallantly in the disaster that Salamis was for the Persian navy. She gained greater favor in the Persian empire. The Persian admiral, by contrast, was given a spindle and distaff. "In Greece, it was a symbol of womanhood. So to give a distaff to a naval commander was surely an insult." [p. 215]
Artemisia was given the prize for bravery in battle. "The story is told that Artemisia received a full suit of Greek armor as a sign of her achievement." [ibid.]
Not exactly what one would call a feminist role model.
Unless, of course, one is running for governor.
Courage.
No. Seriously: Courage.
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